CAROLE KING AWARDED AT THE WHITE HOUSE TODAY

 

Carole King set to receive Gershwin Prize for Popular Song (FIRST WOMAN EVER)...

(WHAT A COINCIDENCE I AM READING HER MEMOIR: "A NATURAL WOMAN" & CAME ACROSS THIS BIT OF NEWS...GREAT YEAR FOR A MUSICAL LEGEND!)

Carole King set to receive Gershwin Prize for Popular Song

Adam Bernstein (" THE WASHINGTON POST")

Reporter:

One fine day in 1957, a 15-year-old named Carol Klein got off the express train from Brooklyn to Manhattan with schoolbooks under one arm and sheet music under the other. She wore bobby socks, white sneakers and a black skirt with a pink poodle embroidered on it.

Starting with the “A”s in the phone book, she began visiting music industry executives, hoping that her aggressive piano playing and perfect pitch would land a contract. At Atlantic Records, impresario Ahmet Ertegun called her “soulful” but sent her on her way. ABC-Paramount invited her to record four of her songs, including a thankfully forgotten number titled “Baby Sittin’ ” (“You know the baby I mean — he’s 17”) .
 

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After a career spanning five decades, more than 20 solo albums and numerous high-profile honors, the 71-year-old King is the first woman to receive the Library of Congress’s Gershwin Prize for Popular Song.

The award, established in 2007 to celebrate the music-writing team of George and Ira Gershwin, will be presented at the White House on Wednesday, after a Tuesday concert in her honor at the Library of Congress. Previous winners include Paul Simon, Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney and the team of Burt Bacharach and Hal David.

In a rare and brief phone interview last week as she wandered around Manhattan’s Upper West Side, King was friendly but not rock-star boastful. She stopped in front of Carnegie Hall, where she gave two sold-out concerts in 1971. She did not linger on that point but instead uttered the old joke of how to get there: “Practice, practice, practice.”

For someone who has spent a lifetime expressing herself in music, she is not overeager to describe the process of writing.

Of lyricist Gerry Goffin, her first husband and early musical partner, she says: “He taught me a lot about the mood of a song, how to set the mood with chords and melody, that major chords can sound very majestic. He didn’t say that. He’d say, ‘I like that one.’ ”

So did millions of record buyers. The pair had a prolific and commercially successful run of pop songwriting — bookended by “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” for the Shirelles in 1960 and “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” for Aretha Franklin in 1967.

King transitioned to performer in a way many “hired gun” songwriters of that era did not. Her breakthrough was the Grammy Award-winning 1971 soft-rock album “Tapestry,” which sold more than 13 million records, clung to the Billboard charts for 302 weeks and helped set the template for the singer-songwriter genre of deeply personal stories set to music.

Songs on the LP included “I Feel the Earth Move,” notable for its rollicking sexuality, the up-tempo tale of relationship rot, “It’s Too Late,” and the reassuring ballad “You’ve Got a Friend,” which provided the only No. 1 hit for her friend James Taylor.

At the peak of her selling power, King left Los Angeles for the backcountry roads of Idaho in 1977. Moving off the grid aligned with the “hippie queen” image she conveyed from photographs of the era showing her with cascades of curly hair, often beside horses or Indian-print drapery.

(I SAW MS. KING PERFORM YEARS AGO IN PHILLY--WOW!--SHE'S EVERYTHING I WANTED HER TO BE AND MORE!---ONE OF THE BEST CONCERTS I HAVE EVER SEEN)

Klein, eventually known as Carole King, wrote in her recent memoir, “I shudder to recall . . .”
The bright side was that her work could only get better. And by any measure, it has.
After a career spanning five decades, more than 20 solo albums and numerous high-profile honors, the 71-year-old King is the first woman to receive the Library of Congress’s Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. The award, established in 2007 to celebrate the music-writing team of George and Ira Gershwin, will be presented at the White House on Wednesday, after a Tuesday concert in her honor at the Library of Congress. Previous winners include Paul Simon, Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney and the team of Burt Bacharach and Hal David.